David Hockney

Across six decades, David Hockney made seeing feel like an act of joy. From the swimming pools of California — that impossible, luminous blue — to the double portraits of friends, the vast Yorkshire landscapes, and the late iPad drawings of spring arriving in Normandy, he never stopped asking the same generous question: how do we really look at the world?

He treated every new tool as a new way to see — Polaroid joiners, the fax machine, the photocopier, the iPhone and iPad — refusing the idea that any of it was beneath painting. What stayed constant was the warmth: a delight in light, in space, in the people he loved, rendered with a clarity that could make the ordinary feel like a revelation.

One of the most beloved and most widely seen artists of his time, Hockney leaves a body of work that is, above all, an argument for attention — for the worth of looking, and looking again.